


Bride/Groom

by alouette_des_champs



Series: The Brunch Club [3]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: A new character I have created in the tags, Age Difference, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Anxiety, Bipolar Disorder, Brother-Sister Relationships, College, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Fluff, Insomnia, It's me the fanfiction barista, Light Dom/sub, Light splash of BDSM in your feelings latte, Meditation, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Sexual Content, Wedding Planning, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-23
Updated: 2019-04-23
Packaged: 2020-01-23 03:44:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18541591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alouette_des_champs/pseuds/alouette_des_champs
Summary: You can't plan a wedding all by yourself.





	Bride/Groom

**Author's Note:**

> This is the sequel to 'May/December' and a companion piece to 'Gemini/Libra.' It can probably stand alone, but I did a lot of set-up in 'May/December,' so you might want to give that one a read first.

“Hey, babe, do you think I should get my teeth fixed?” Lup was looking in the bathroom mirror, doing her makeup while Barry was in the shower, part of their usual morning routine. She had paused midway through applying mascara to examine her front teeth from all angles, scowling.

“What’s wrong with them?” came the confused answer from behind the shower curtain.

She rolled her eyes. Stupid, sweet man. “You know what’s wrong with them. They’re crooked in the front.” She hadn’t really thought about it in years, but a coworker at the college had actually had the cojones to ask her to her face whether or not she was going to get her teeth fixed before she took wedding pictures. It had taken all of her willpower not to smack a bitch right then and there, but afterwards, it had started to eat at her.

Her teeth were just part of the equation. There were a lot of physical expectations for a bride-to-be. She was already trying to stop biting her fingernails because her cuticles were always bleeding and smarting, but the thought of having her ugly, ragged fingers preserved in one of those cute cake-cutting pics for posterity made her want to barf. Her hair didn’t have enough volume. She looked pale and tired all the time, and her freckles stood out like she was one of the fucking Little Rascals. No amount of bold, confident lipstick choices seemed to be doing the trick lately, and she had a _lot_ of bold, confident lipsticks. 

“Yeah, so? Does it hurt or something?” Barry was clearly not following her line of reasoning.

“No. It would just be cosmetic. But I don’t know…might be worth it.” She had been searching her whole life for things that might make her feel better, band-aids for bullet wounds. There had never been a time when she had been happy with herself, with how she looked, with where she was and what she was doing. She was never satisfied.

“It’s up to you. But I think it’s cute. Always have.”

“Of course _you_ do.” She said this with an accusatory sort of fondness. She knew there was nothing about her that he would change, but that didn’t mean that she was perfect. She wanted to be perfect. The water shut off, and he reached for his towel.

“You okay?” He was trying to sound casual, but she could tell that he was worried about her. She felt a little pang of guilt.

“I’m fine. You know I get weird when I’m stressed out.”

“We can postpone the wedding, you know. It doesn’t have to be right now. Six months, a year, so that you could have more time to put it together…” Barry squinted at her, totally blind without his glasses, as he dried his hair.

“No, I don’t want to do that.” She returned to her mascara, leaning closer to the mirror. “I’ve got a handle on it.” That was what she kept saying, but planning a wedding was turning out to be harder than Lup had thought it was going to be, both emotionally and logistically speaking.

She wasn’t the type of girl to drop a hundred grand on cakes and dresses. She didn’t want a big, frilly church thing or a barefoot beach thing or a fake-rustic thing in a barn. She wanted a simple, meaningful ceremony, and then maybe afterwards she wanted to bungee jump off a bridge. She hadn’t decided yet. 

It did not make it easier that she was doing it all on her own. 

She loved Barry dearly, but asking him to plan a social event was a little like asking a horse to sprout wings and fly. He had offered to help, but she had mercifully let him off the hook. Taako was obviously overflowing with ideas, but he didn’t have a great grasp on the concept of a budget. Barry’s mother didn’t appear to actually want to help; she just wanted license to call Lup at inconvenient times and grill her about what she had and hadn’t gotten done. Lucretia—her last resort—couldn’t understand why they didn’t just go to the courthouse, neat and quick.

The answer was complicated. It wasn’t just a wedding. They didn’t _need_ to get married; they already lived together, had a joint bank account, put each other’s names down for their emergency contacts…they even worked at the same university, in the same department. They were intertwined as two people could get. It was kind of like a middle finger to the universe. She felt like it was something both of them deserved, a day set aside to say, _fuck you world, we made it._ Lup had never imagined that she would make it past twenty-five. She had carved off so many pieces of herself over the years in order to survive, made so many concessions, struck so many unsavory bargains. She didn’t want to compromise anymore. This was _her_ wedding, goddammit, and it would be what _she_ wanted it to be.

That did not stop people from trying to change her mind.

She was standing in line at the campus coffee shop at lunchtime, surrounded by throngs of frazzled undergrads just beginning their lifelong caffeine addictions, when her phone rang. She took a deep breath before she answered, trying in vain to center herself.

“Hi, Marlena.” This was not the type of mother figure she had been missing in her life. Barry’s mother was overbearing, bossy, and passive aggressive. Her own mother had been a lot of things, had a lot of qualities that had not made for a very good mother, but at least she hadn’t been a huge bitch.

“Hello hello!” the other woman chirped. “I was just calling to tell you that I was just watching the TV and saw the cutest ideas for wedding place-mats. I’ll have to show you when I see you on Tuesday.”

“Yeah, I’d love to see that.” Her voice sounded flat and tired. Lup was not a very good liar.

“Did you get the invitations sent out yet?”

“I thought I told you that I’m not doing invitations. We’re not really inviting that many people. I thought I’d just talk to everyone.”

“Well, it’s really more of a keepsake than anything else,” Marlena said airily, obviously judging her.

“We’re trying to save a little money. Academic’s salary, y’know…” They’d had this exact conversation at least six times, but it never seemed to sink in. If the old witch thought she could wear Lup down with repetition, then she was sadly mistaken. She had challenged the wrong woman to a battle of wills.

“Do you need me to lend you money, Lup? You know I would.”

She gritted her teeth. “No, thank you, really. I’ve got it covered. I’m gonna let you go, okay? I’m about to order in a coffee shop.”

“Don’t drink too much coffee, hon, it’ll turn your teeth yellow. Tell Barry I said hi.” Why did everyone hate her teeth? A fresh wave of irritation swept through her.

“I will. Buh-bye.”

Lup stomped back to her building with a coffee in each hand, shoulder-checking several phone-absorbed twenty-somethings out of her way. Holding one cup in the crook of her elbow, she flung the door to Barry’s office open without knocking.

“I came to yell at you, so I brought you a latte.” He was sitting at his desk, surrounded by stacks of midterms, and when he looked up at her he was already smiling. It was insane, how her heart still fluttered like she was thirteen years old when he looked at her like that with those big brown eyes behind those dorky Buddy Holly glasses, how it softened her up immediately.

He didn’t seem too concerned. “Ah, the classic Trojan latte. Your fiancée offers you coffee, leaving you vulnerable to attack.” She was determined not to laugh. She plunked the cup down on the desk somberly and sat down in the chair across from him.

“Your mother calls me at least once a day and bitches at me about the same five things. I can’t take it anymore. I’m going to bury her alive with an oxygen tank like in _Saw_ until our wedding is over.” His mouth twisted sympathetically.

“I wish I knew where her off-switch was. It would have made my childhood a lot more peaceful. She’s been perfecting her monster-in-law routine for a long time. Want me to talk to her?”

“Yes. Please. Tell her I love her, but I’m so fucking swamped that my head is actually going to explode, and then her son will be marrying a headless woman.”

“Are you sure you don’t want me to help with anything?” He pushed his glasses up his nose, furrowing his eyebrows.

“I’m sure, babe. Taako is helping me.” As much as he could help anyone do anything, anyway. He was a grade-A flake with the short-term memory of a goldfish. He always insisted that it was his medication that made him such a space cadet, and while that might have been true to some extent, she had known him his whole life, and he had never been Mr. Reliable. She loved him. She was proud of him. She just wished that he would get a day planner or something. 

“Okay. Just let me know if you need me. What are you doing this afternoon?”

“Meetings.” She made a face. “Then finishing up some stuff in the lab. What happened to your TAs?” She nodded at the stack of tests. “Isn’t that unpaid grad student labor, Mr. Professor?” He rolled his eyes.

“My TAs couldn’t find their own asses with both hands.”

“Let me take a stack, then. I don’t have to go for another half an hour.” She grinned and glanced over her shoulder at the door. “Or we could just have a quickie in your office.”

“As much as I would love to live in a world where that’s possible, an undergrad could walk in here at literally any moment to beg for extra credit.”

“Gross. You killed my sex drive as soon as you said ‘undergrad.’” She grabbed a pile of midterms and a pen, kicked her feet up on his desk, and started grading. When she glanced up about twenty tests later to comment that his class was full of a bunch of fucking idiots, he was already looking at her. It wasn’t in her to shrink from other people’s eyes, but sometimes he looked at her with such affection and tenderness that she wanted to cry. She put her feet on the floor again and leaned forward.

“I’m assuming you were thinking about how much you wanted to kiss my gorgeous face, so here it is.” 

“You read my mind.” He kissed her. “Now go to your meeting. You’re always late.”

“You’re not the boss of me, man.” She stuck her tongue out as she tossed the midterms back onto his desk and started gathering up her things.

“Get out of here.” He gave her a playful slap on the ass when she bent over to retrieve her bag.

“Mr. Professor!” she gasped, faux-scandalized. “I’m telling the dean that you’re getting fresh with me.”

“Tell whoever you want. Love you.”

“Love you too,” she called on her way out, tossing a smile over her shoulder. He always managed to put her in such a good mood, to diffuse her like a bomb without even trying. He knew when to challenge her and when to just love her through whatever it was she was wrestling with.

It was Friday, and both of them were exhausted by the end of the day. They were both in bed before ten’o’clock, Barry reading one of his nerdy fantasy novels while Lup scrolled disinterestedly through Twitter, each something easily digestible to wind down with at the end of the day. With a huge yawn, she set her phone on the nightstand and pulled the comforter over her wiry shoulders.

“Read to me,” she demanded, wriggling under Barry’s arm. She looped an arm around his chest to make herself even harder to get rid of. “Be my sexy human audiobook.”

“Not sure it’ll be your cup of tea, beautiful,” he replied, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. She didn’t care if he read a trashy novel, the back of a box of macaroni, or the owner’s manual for his car. She just wanted to hear his voice. 

“That’s okay. I’ll probably fall asleep, anyway.” She dozed pleasantly as he read from the tattered paperback, something about a long journey on horseback, swords at the ready, camping in a marsh filled with fairy light. She felt his voice more than she really heard what he was saying, vibrating deep in his chest. She was close to dropping off for good when he closed the book, set it on the night table along with his glasses, and switched off the lamp, moving gingerly so that he didn’t jostle her too much.

“Are you awake?” he whispered. She let out a wordless, indignant mumble, and he chuckled.

“Okay, okay. Goodnight.”

She was awoken some time later when he scooted her over onto her side of the bed and got up, shuffling into the bathroom. He had to take medication to sleep sometimes. He had a lot of anxiety, she knew, and it was hard for him to turn his brain off. She tried not to overburden him with her shit, tried not to drag all her problems and her worries into their home and their bed. That was one of the reasons she didn’t want to rope him into the nightmare of wedding planning. She tried her best to be soothing when she could, which was not a word most people would use to describe her personality. 

“What are you thinking about?” she murmured groggily as she watched him climb back into bed. He laid down on his stomach, facing her, and she ran her palm over his shoulder, drew patterns on his bare back with her nails.

“Nothing important. Just work. My brain is on a loop.” He closed his eyes. “That feels good, though.”

She hummed. “Want me to tell you about a place I like?” This game was how she and Taako had calmed each other down at night in new, chaotic environments, foster home after foster home, and it seemed to work just as well on Barry. He made a quiet noise of agreement. “There’s a big oak tree out back at my auntie’s house, right in the middle of the yard. I used to climb up way too high so that I could see everything, the house, the street, and all the way into the woods. It was so quiet up there, except for the leaves rustling. I would sit on a big branch and just watch everything happen.”

He was still out when she woke up the next morning, so much so that her getting up and getting ready to go didn’t rouse him even a little. She had plans to go look at cakes with Taako. 

The day started out pleasantly enough. They grabbed some coffees and shared some laughs; after that, however, things went downhill unsurprisingly quickly. They argued in the bakery until the embarrassed owner asked them to leave in a tense whisper. He’d asked why she didn’t just let him make the cake. _You’re already making the rest of the food, I don’t want you to have to worry about the cake too,_ she’d answered. He had accused her of thinking that he was an invalid. And so on. She drove him home in lethal silence.

He would never say it in so many words, but Taako still resented her for going off to college and leaving him behind in their hometown. He’d been fine when she’d left. He’d had a job. He’d been taking classes at the community college. When she’d come back to visit at the end of her semester, he had been a totally different person. Twenty pounds thinner, dropped out of school, new haircut, new apartment, no job, new shady boyfriend with a neck tattoo. He had always been a little reckless, but she could tell the difference. When she’d tried to confront him about it, he had called her a stuck-up bitch, told her to leave him the fuck alone. 

So she had. 

She’d gone back to school and stayed there for a whole year, no visits, only a handful of calls. _I deserved my own life,_ she reminded herself again and again (at the insistence of her therapist,) but it didn’t take the sting away. When she got herself worked up about it, Barry always asked, _what would you have done, Lup? You didn’t have any money. He wasn’t in any place to listen to anyone. You were a kid, too. You were just as alone._

_I could have been there, at least. My scholarship would have waited. I could have gotten a year off. He didn’t have to go through any of that, we could have nipped it in the bud, gotten him away from Sazed before it really got nasty, I could have looked out for him…_ It was impossible to explain to him the precise way in which she had failed because he hadn’t been there for the first part of their lives, when the only constant had been each other. From their mother’s squalid apartment to their aunt’s country bungalow to a series of foster homes where they had slept in the same bed long into their teen years to deter any nighttime funny business, it had always been the two of them. And then she’d left, suddenly, unceremoniously.

When she got home, dragging like she had just run a marathon, the house was empty. There was a note on the fridge from Barry. Sometimes he seemed to forget about the invention of cell phones. It was something about a hardware store, signed with his usual messily-drawn heart. That, at least, made her smile. She decided to take a bath to calm her rankled nerves. 

Unfortunately, sitting in the fragrant bubbles with a glass of white wine did not make her feel any better. She could see her reflection a little in the mirror, and she sunk down to avoid looking at it. She looked just like her mother mid-breakdown. Two glasses in, and she started to get a little weepy. She never cried. Barry was the emotional one. He cried during sappy movies. He had to leave the room during commercials featuring abandoned dogs or sick kids. When he talked about things that made him happy, sometimes he got choked up. She had long ago learned to hide what she was feeling so that nobody could use it against her. But alone, in the bath, she could get a little teary-eyed. A lot teary-eyed. Cry into the bathwater, deep, open-mouthed, silent sobs that made her stomach hurt.

By the time he got home, she had pulled herself together. Sort of. In the past, she’d cycled through several coping mechanisms. When she’d been younger, it had been getting blackout drunk and fucking strangers. When she had outgrown that, she’d started taking kickboxing classes and beating the ever-living shit out of everything. Once that had stopped working, she’d been forced to actually go to a therapist and learn how to act like a goddamn adult.

She sat down with her legs crossed in the middle of the carpet in the living room, wrapped in a big sweater she had stolen from Barry and a pair of holey leggings, her hair piled haphazardly on top of her head. She was listening to a video that reeled off a list of affirmations over some royalty-free spa music with her eyes closed, but she still heard the front door open and shut. When she opened her eyes, he was standing in the doorway, looking at her. She smiled and paused her video.

“Creepy, babe.”

“Sorry,” he said sheepishly. She shook her head, beckoning him over. 

“Come sit with me while I finish.” He got down on the carpet beside her, leaning back against the couch, and she settled herself between his legs, leaning back against his chest, his arms wrapped around her middle. He’d scooped her off the floor and into this position more than once, his hand pressed gently over her diaphragm, reminding her to breathe as he coaxed her back down to earth. She hit play.

_There are a lot of things I appreciate about myself. I am a kind and compassionate person. I try to be kind to myself and to others. I am learning that I am worthy of respect. I respect myself. I know that what happened to me was not my fault. I am healing from what happened to me. What happened to me does not define me. I can build healthy relationships. I am worthy of healthy relationships. There are good things in my life._

They sat in silence for after the video ended, just breathing together. After a long moment, she stretched, feeling his body warm and solid against her back, and well…she was still a little loose from all the wine and the bubble bath. She pulled his hand from her waist to her lips and kissed each of his fingers in slow succession, dragging the pads of his fingers over her lips.

“Is this what you think about when you meditate?” he asked playfully. Even after all this time, Barry always seemed a little surprised whenever she made a move on him. She knew he would never believe her, but she wanted to say, _don’t you understand that I want you all the time? It’s not a conscious decision. When you kiss me, when touch the small of my back in public, when you smile at me, I get light-headed. You have no idea what you do to me._

“Sometimes,” she murmured. “Sometimes going deep inside my subconscious makes me contemplate the mystery of being, and sometimes it just makes me horny.” He laughed. The joking didn’t interrupt the atmosphere of quiet intimacy that had been building. He palmed her breasts through her sweater, rolling her nipples between his fingers, pinching them gently. She relaxed against him, as patient as she could be, occasionally breathing out sharply through her nose when he caught her in just the right way. He was in no hurry. She was the one who was always in a hurry, doing things too fast, too hard, too intensely, like she’d never get to do them again. He liked to take his time, and she tried to slow down with him. 

He slid his hand between her legs and rubbed her in tight circles over her pants. She brought her knees up, pressing them together in frustration, but he tutted disapprovingly, running his free hand over her tense thigh.

“Easy,” he whispered, breathing out deeply. She followed suit, relaxing her legs again, spread slightly. He slipped his hand under her waistband and into her underwear. She sighed when he parted her lips with one finger, stroking her hood softly. 

“I’m so proud of you, how you’re taking care of yourself,” he said, swirling the pad of his finger lightly around her clit. She arched her back a helplessly. He knew damn well that this was the only time that he could get away with saying something like that; there were a lot of walls that had to come down for her to accept that type of deeply personal, earnest, genuine compliment. “You’re so strong.” He stroked the soft skin of her stomach with his other hand, kissing along her jaw. He slipped one finger inside her, and she gasped. “You’re amazing, Lup.” She pressed her hips forward, trying to get him to move faster, but he continued to slide in and out of her at a measured pace, his finger curled at just the right angle to kindle a white fire in her middle.

“Holy shit,” she moaned. “I love you.” He chuckled.

“I love you too, beautiful.” He returned to her clit, this time a little faster, the touches still feather-light. She was wound so tight that it felt like she was going to shatter.

“Please?” she whined, drawing out the word like a kid begging for candy.

“You know I can’t say no to you,” he murmured, drawing quick, firm circles around her clit with a practiced hand. She grabbed his arm and held on tightly as her muscles jumped erratically. She gasped, a ragged, hiccuping sound, as pleasure spiked hard through her. 

After a moment, he withdrew his hand. She was still breathing hard, shaking a little, but she felt better, safer, softer.

“Doing okay?” he asked softly, giving her a squeeze. 

“Yeah.” She knew what she needed to do, what she needed to say. She was just so goddamn stubborn, such a control freak. It was so easy. She swallowed, her mouth dry. “Hey, babe?”

“What?”

“I need you to help me with the wedding, okay?”

“Okay. Sure.” He said it so casually, like she hadn’t jumped a huge mental hurdle, like she hadn’t just had some sort of breakthrough. He pressed a kiss to her temple. “You can fill me in later.”

“Thanks.” She closed her eyes and smiled.

Even though she was fighting with her brother, it was implicitly understood that they were still on for Sunday brunch. You didn’t fuck with tradition. It was Lup’s turn to pick the restaurant, which meant that they were going to one of those delightfully trashy places with the huge, plate-sized pancakes that they gave you a t-shirt for if you could finish them in under fifteen minutes. She had the t-shirt, of course. Taako and Kravitz had still dressed like Johnny and June in matching all-black with a weird amount of leather for reasons that she would never be able to fathom, but at least she and Barry looked like a couple of normal human beings who weren’t too gay to function. Taako caught her arm before they had even made it inside, his face screwed up in a familiar expression of guilt.

“Hey, Lulu, I’m sorry for yesterday,” he said. She flung her arms around him before he had even finished his sentence.

“Me, too. You can make the cake if you want.”

“God, no. That’s so much fucking pressure. We’re gonna need to find a new bakery, because that one is _not_ letting us back in.” They both giggled, twining their fingers together as they followed their significant others into the restaurant.

She was still stressed. There were parts of herself that she still didn’t like. But there were people in her corner, people who couldn’t be driven away by a stupid argument or crooked teeth or a bad day, people who thought she was amazing, and who she thought were amazing in turn. That was all that she needed at her wedding. It didn’t really matter what flavor the cake was or what the place-mats looked like.

Maybe she still wanted to go bungee jumping off a bridge, though.


End file.
